- - - , . , .
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
EMILE
or
On Education
Introduction, Translation,
and Notes
B Y
B
BOOKST O T H E M E M O R Y O F
V I C T O R B A R A S
M Y S T U D E N T A N D F R I E N D
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778.
Emile: or On education.
Includes bibliographical references and index. I. Education-Early works to 1800. I. Title.
LBgz.Eg 1979 370 78-73765
ISBN-10 0-465-01931-5 (pbk.) ISBN-13 978-0-465-01931-1 (pbk.)
Foreword, Introduction, English translation, and Notes copyright O 1979 by Basic Books,
Printed in the United States of America
DESIGNED BY V I N C E N T TORRE
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Note
vii3
29
E M
I
L E
or
On
Education
P R E F A C E
Explanation of the Illustrations
B O O K I
B O O K I 1
B O O K 1 1 1
B O O K I V
B O O K V
Notes
Index
Foreword
w ' N I WROTE the preface to my translation of the
Republic, I did not have to argue the importance of the book; I had to justify only the need for a new translation when there were so many famous existing versions. With Emile the situation is the reverse: there is general agreement that the only available translation is inadequate in all important respects, while the book itself is not held to be of great significance and has little appeal to contemporary taste. However, this is not the place to make a case for Emile. I can only hope that this transla-tion will contribute to a reconsideratransla-tion of this most fundamental and necessary book.
The translation aims, above all, at accuracy. Of course, no intelligible translation could be strictly literal, and simply bad English would mis-represent Rousseau's very good French. Style cannot be separated from substance. But unless the translator himself were a genius of Rous-seau's magnitude, the attempt to imitate the felicity of his language would fail and would distort and narrow his meaning. One would have to look at what one can say well in English rather than at Rous-seau's thought. He is a precise and careful writer. He speaks of a real world of which we all have experience, no matter what our language. He, above all writers, thought he spoke to all men. The translator must concentrate on making his English point to the same things Rous-seau's French points to. And this is best done by finding the closest equivalents to his words and sticking to them, even when that causes inconvenience.
Every translation is, of course, in some sense an interpretation; and thus there can be no mechanical rules for translation. The question, then, is what disposition gUides the translator: whether the impossibility of simple literalness is a fact against which he struggles and a source of dissatisfaction with himself, or whether he uses it as an excuse to display his virtuosity. As with most choices, the right one is least likely to afford opportunities for flattering one's vanity. The translator of a great work should revere his text and recognize that there is much in it he cannot understand. His translation should try to make others able to understand what he cannot understand, which means he often must prefer a dull ambiguity to a brilliant resolution. He is a messenger, not a plenipotentiary, and proves his fidelity to his great masters by re-producing what seems in them to the contemporary eye wrong, out-rageous, or incomprehensible, for therein may lie what is most im-portant for us. He resists the temptation to make the book attractive or relevant, for its relevance may lie in its appearing irrelevant to current thought. If books are to be liberating, they must seem implausible in the half-light of our plausibilities which we no longer know how to
FOREWORD
tion. An old book must appear to be old-fashioned, and a translator cannot lessen the effort required of the reader; he can only make it possible for the reader to make that effort. Therefore the translator will try to imitate the text, insofar as possible following sentence structure; he will never vary terms Rousseau does not vary, but where Rousseau repeats a particular French word, the translator will also repeat its English equivalent; he will never choose English words whose origins are in later thought, even though Rousseau may have been the inspira-tion of that thought. This is what I have tried to do, but I have often failed. A verb of capital significance for Rousseau like sentir and its various derivatives-such as sentiment, sensible, sensibilite-simply de-fied reduction to Rousseau's unity of usage. Sometimes I have had to use "feel" and its derivatives and sometimes "sense" and its derivatives; and a very few times I have had to use an English word with an entirely different root (always trying to link it with "sense" or "feel"). On the other hand, I have been fortunate with other important words like
nature and its derivatives; and the reader can be sure that if they occur in the translation, they are in the original French and vice versa. This translation is meant to give the reader a certain confidence that he is thinking about Rousseau and not about me, as well as to inspire in him a disconcerting awareness that, to be sure, he must learn French.
The notes have been kept to a minimum in order not to distract from the text; and the intention behind them was to permit the reader to confront the text without feeling hopelessly dependent on expert mid-dlemen. Interpretation will be available in the volume of commentary to follow. The notes are limited to translations of citations from other languages and identification of their sources, to mention of a few im-portant textual variants, and to explanations of some difficult words and references whose meanings Rousseau took for granted but are now obscure. And in order to avoid a morass of questionable scholarly con-jecture about the influences on Rousseau, the notes attempt to locate only those passages in the works of other writers to which Rousseau explicitly refers. It is Similarly treacherous to try to interpret one of Rousseau's books in light of another, for every phrase is conditioned by his specific intention in each work. An understanding of the whole can be attained only by a firm grasp on each of the parts; to interpret a passage in one book by a passage in another is to risk misunderstand-ing both and to deny their independent intelligibility. There are, thne-fore, such cross-references only where Rousseau himself indicates that they are appropriate. All this is done in the conviction that the profound reader need not be the scholarly reader-and vice versa.
The French editions of Emile used for the translation were those of Fran~ois and Pierre Richard, published by Gamier, Paris, 1939, and of Charles Wirz and Pierre Burgelin, pages 239-868 in Volume IV of Rousseau's Oeuvres Completes, edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Bibliotheque de la PIeiade, Gallimard, Paris, 1969. I gen-erally followed the text of the first edition of Emile and refer in the notes to significant variations provided by the various manuscripts and a copy of the first edition in which Rousseau made changes for a complete edition of his works that was to be published in 1764.
I undertook this translation with a selfish motive: I thought it the best way to familiarize myself with a book which was very alien to me but which seemed to contain hidden treasures. One of the results of this project has been a new sense of what it means to be a teacher and of the peculiar beauty of the relationship between teacher and student. Only Socrates rivals Rousseau in the depth and detail of his understand-ing of that most generous of associations. And learnunderstand-ing from Rousseau has given me the occasion to learn from my students while teaching them. Over the past eight years I have given several classes on Emile, and the interest it provoked gave evidence of its usefulness. By students' questions and suggestions I have been led toward the heart of the text. It provided a ground for community among us in the quest for under-standing of ourselves. As this translation progressed, I have used it in my classes, and my first thanks go to all those students who read it and corrected it, testing it in the situation for which it was intended. They are too numerous to mention, but I should like to single out Joel Schwartz, Janet Ajzenstat, Sidney Keith, John Harper, and Marc Plattner who went over it with particular care. MyoId friends Irene Berns, Werner Dannhauser, and Midge Decter also helped me greatly.
I also want to thank the Canada Council, the John Simon Guggen-heim Foundation, and the Earhart Foundation for their generous as-sistance which made it possible for me to do this work.
The Introduction is a revised version of "The Education of Democratic Man" which appeared in Daedalus, Summer 1978, and is reprinted with the permission of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
ALLAN BLOOM
Toronto, June I978
Introduction
IN
the Vi"ou,,, on the On.qin, of Inequa/ityRou"eau 'ummon,men to hear for the first time the true history of their species. 1 Man was born free, equal, self-sufficient, unprejudiced, and whole; now, at the end of history, he is in chains (ruled by other men or by laws he did not make), defined by relations of inequality (rich or poor, noble or commoner, master or slave), dependent, full of false opinions or superstitions, and divided between his inclinations and his duties. Nature made man a brute, but happy and good. History-and man is the only animal with a history-by the development of his facuIties and the progress of his mind has made man civilized, but unhappy and immoral. History is not a theodicy but a tale of misery and corruption.
Emile, on the other hand, has a happy ending, and Rousseau says
he cares little if men take it to be only a novel, for it ought, he says, to be the history of his species.2 And therewith he provides the key to Emile. It is, as Kant says,a the work which attempts to reconcile nature
with history, man's selfish nature with the demands of civil society, hence, inclination with duty. Man requires a healing education which returns him to himself. Rousseau's paradoxes-his attack on the arts and the sciences while he practices them, his praise of the savage and natural freedom over against his advocacy of the ancient city, the gen-eral will, and virtue, his perplexing presentations of himself as citizen, lover, and solitary-are not expressions of a troubled soul but accurate reflections of an incoherence in the structure of the world we all face, or rather, in general, do not face; and Emile is an experiment in restor-ing harmony to that world by reorderrestor-ing the emergence of man's ac-quisitions in such a way as to avoid the imbalances created by them while allowing the full actualization of man's potential. Rousseau be-lieved that his was a privileged moment, a moment when all of man's faculties had revealed themselves and when man had, furthermore, at-tained for the first time knowledge of the principles of human nature.
Emile is the canvas on which Rousseau tried to paint all of the soul's
acquired passions and learning in such a way as to cohere with man's natural wholeness. It is a Phenomenology
of
the Mind posing as Dr.Spock.
Thus Emile is one of those rare total or synoptic books, a book with which one can live and which becomes deeper as one becomes deeper, 1. In Oeuvres completes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and
Marcel Raymond, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959-1969, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade), vol. 3, p. 133; The First and Second Discourses, ed. R. Masters (New York: St.
Mar-tin's, 1964), pp. 103-104. 2. P. 416 below.
3. "Conjectural Beginning of Human History," in On History, ed. Lewis Beck
EMILE
a book comparable to Plato's Republic, which it is meant to rival or
supersede.4 But it is not recognized as such in spite of Rousseau's own judgment that it was his best book and Kant's view that its publication was an event comparable to the French Revolution. Of Rousseau's major works it is the one least studied or commented on. It is as though the book's force had been entirely spent on impact with men like Kant and Schiller, leaving only the somewhat cranky residue for which the book retains its fame in teacher training schools: the harangues against swaddling and in favor of breast feeding and the learning of a trade. Whatever the reasons for its loss of favor (and this would make an interesting study) Emile is a truly great book, one that lays out for the
first time and with the greatest clarity and vitality the modern way of posing the problems of psychology.
By this I mean that Rousseau is at the source of the tradition which replaces virtue and vice as the causes of a man's being good or bad, happy or miserable, with such pairs of opposites as sincere/insincere, authentic/inauthentic, inner-directed/ other-directed, real self/ alienated self. All these have their source in Rousseau's analysis of amour de soi
and amour-propre, a division within man's soul resulting from man's
bodily and spiritual dependence on other men which ruptures his orig-inal unity or wholeness. The distinction between amour de soi and amour-propre is meant to provide the true explanation for that tension
within man which had in the past been understood to be a result of the opposed and irreconcilable demands of the body and the soul. Emile
gives the comprehensive account of the genesis of amour-propre,
dis-plays its rich and multifarious aspects (spreads the peacock's tail, as it were), and maps man's road back to himself from his spiritual exile (his history) during which he wandered through nature and society, a return to himself which incorporates into his substance all the cum-bersome treasures he gathered en route. This analysis supersedes that based on the distinction between body and soul, which in its turn had activated the quest for virtue, seen as the taming and controlling of the body's desires under the guidance of the soul's reason. It initiates the great longing to be one's self and the hatred of alienation which characterizes all modern thought. The wholeness, unity, or singleness of man-a project ironically outlined in the Republic-is the serious
intention of Emile and almost all that came afterward.
Emile is written to defend man against a great threat which bids fair
to cause a permanent debasement of the species, namely, the almost inevitable universal dominance of a certain low human type which Rousseau was the first to isolate and name: the bourgeois. Rousseau's
enemy was not the ancien regime, its throne, its altar, or its nobility. He was certain that all these were finished, that revolution would shortly sweep them away to make room for a new world based on the egalitarian principles of the new philosophy. The real struggle would then concern the kind of man who was going to inhabit that world, for the striking element of the situation was and is that a true theoretical
insight seems to have given rise to a low human consequence. What I mean by this is that the bourgeois, that debased form of the species, is the incarnation of the political science of Hobbes and Locke, the first principles of which Rousseau accepted. We can see this with particular clarity in Tocqueville's Democracy in America, the scheme of which is adopted from Rousseau. Equality, Tocqueville tells us, is now almost a providential fact; no one believes any longer in the justice of the prin-ciples on which the old distinctions between ranks or classes were made and which were the basis of the old regime. The only question remaining is whether freedom can accompany equality or universal tyranny will result from it. It is to the formation of free men and free communities founded on egalitarian principles to which both Rousseau and Tocqueville are dedicated.
Now, who, according to Rousseau, is the bourgeois? Most simply, following Hegel's formula, he is the man motivated by fear of violent death, the man whose primary concern is self-preservation or, according to Locke's correction of Hobbes, comfortable self-preservation. Or, to describe the inner workings of his soul, he is the man who, when deal-ing with others, thinks only of himself, and on the other hand, in his understanding of himself, thinks only of others. He is a role-player. The bourgeois is contrasted by Rousseau, on the one side, with the natural man, who is whole and simply concerned with himself, and on the other, with the citizen, whose very being consists in his relation to his city, who understands his good to be identical with the common good. The bourgeois distinguishes his own good from the common good. His good requires society, and hence he exploits others while depending on them. He must define himself in relation to them. The bourgeois comes into being when men no longei believe that there is a common good, when the notion of the fatherland decays. Rousseau hints that he follows Machiavelli in attributing this decay to Christianity, which promised the heavenly fatherland and thereby took away the supports from the earthly fatherland, leaving social men who have no reason to sacrifice private desire to public duty.
What Christianity revealed, modern philosophy gave an account of: man is not naturally a political being; he has no inclination toward justice. By nature he cares only for his own preservation, and all of his faculties are directed to that end. Men are naturally free and equal in the decisive respects: they have no known authority over them, and they all pursue the same independent end. Men have a natural right to do what conduces to their preservation. All of this Rousseau holds to be true. He differs only in that he does not believe that the duty to obey the laws of civil SOciety can be derived from self-interest. Hobbes and Locke burdened self-interest with more than it can bear; in every de-cisive instance the sacrifice of the public to the private follows from nature. They produced hypocrites who make promises they cannot in-tend to keep and who feign concern for others out of concern for themselves, thus using others as means to their ends and alienating themselves. Civil society becomes merely the combat zone for the pur-suit of power-control over things and especially over men. With en-lightenment the illusions are dispelled, and men learn that they care
EMILE
about their own lives more than about country, family, friendship, or honor. Fanaticism, although dangerous and distorting, could at least produce selfless and extraordinary deeds. But now fanaticism gives way to calculation. And pride, although it is the spur to domination, is also allied with that noble indifference to life which seems to be a precondition of freedom and the resistance to tyranny. But quenched by fear, pride gives way to vanity, the concern for petty advantages over others. This diminution of man is the apparent result of his enlighten-ment about his true nature.
In response to this challenge of the new philosophy Rousseau under-takes to rethink man's nature in its relation to the need for society en-gendered by history. What he attempts is to present an egalitarian politics that rivals Plato's politics in moral appeal rather than an egalitarian politics that debases man for the sake of the will-of-the-wisp, security. In imagination he takes an ordinary boy and experiments with the pos-sibility of making him into an autonomous man-morally and intellec-tually independent, as was Plato's philosopher-king, an admittedly rare, and hence aristocratic, human type. The success of such a venture would prove the inherent dignity of man as man, each and every ordinary man, and thus it would provide a high-level ground for the choice of democracy. Since Rousseau, overcoming of the bourgeois has been re-garded as almost identical with the problem of the realization of true democracy and the achievement of "genuine personality."
The foregoing reflections give a clue to the literary character of Emile. The two great moral-political traditions that were ultimately displaced by the modern natural right teachings-that is, the Biblical and the classical-were accompanied by great works of what may be called poetry. This poetry depicts great human types who embody visions of the right way of life, who make that way of life plausible, who excite admiration and emulation. The Bible, on the highest level, gives us prophets and saints; and in the realm of ordinary possibility it gives us the pious man, Homer and Plutarch give us, at the peak, heroes; and, for everyday fare, gentlemen. Modern philosophy, on the other hand, could not inspire a great poetry corresponding to itself. The exemplary man whom it produces is too contemptible for the noble Muse; he can never be a model for those who love the beautiful. The fact that he cannot is symptomatic of how the prosaic new philosophy truncates the human possibility. With Emile Rousseau confronts this challenge and dares to enter into competition with the greatest of the old poets. He sets out to create a human type whose charms can rival those of the saint or the tragic hero-the natural man-and thereby shows that his thought too can comprehend the beautiful in man.
Emile consists of a series of stories, and its teaching comes to light
only when one has grasped each of these stories in its complex detail and artistic unity. Interpretation of this "novel," the first Bildungsroman, requires a union of l'esprit de geometrie and l'esprit de finesse, a union which it both typifies and teaches. It is impossible here to do more than indicate the plan of the work and tentatively describe its general
intention in the hope of indicating the nature of this work whose study is so imperative for an understanding of the human possibility.
I
Emile is divided into two large segments. Books I-III are devoted to the rearing of a civilized savage, a man who cares only about himself, who is independent and self-sufficient and on whom no duties that run counter to his inclinations and so divide him are imposed, whose knowl-edge of the crafts and the sciences does not involve his incorporation into the system of public opinion and division of labor. Books IV-V attempt to bring this atomic individual into human society and into a condition of moral responsibility on the basis of his inclinations and his generosity.
Rousseau's intention in the first segment comes most clearly to light in its culmination, when Jean-Jacques, the tutor, gives his pupil the first and only book he is to read prior to early adulthood. Before pre-senting his gift, Jean-Jacques expresses to the reader the general senti-ment that he hates all bookS-including, implicitly but especially, the book of books, the guide of belief and conduct, the Bible. Books act as intermediaries between men and things; they attach men to the opin-ions of others rather than forcing them to understand on their own or leaving them in ignorance. They excite the imagination, increasing thereby the desires, the hopes, and the fears beyond the realm of the necessary. All of Emile's early rearing is an elaborate attempt to avoid the emergence of the imagination which, according to the Discourse on the Origins
of
Inequality, is the faculty that turns man's intellectualprogress into the source of his misery. But, in spite of this general injunction against books and in direct contradiction of what he has just said, Rousseau does introduce a book, one which presents a new teach-ing and a new mode of teaching. The book is Robinson Crusoe, and it is
not meant to be merely a harmless amusement for Emile but to provide him with a vision of the whole and a standard for the judgment of both things and men."
Robinson Crusoe is a solitary man in the state of nature, outside of civil society and unaffected by the deeds or opinions of men. His sole concern is his preservation and comfort. All his strength and reason are dedicated to these ends, and utility is his guiding principle, the principle that organizes all his knowledge. The world he sees contains neither gods nor heroes; there are no conventions. Neither the memory of Eden nor the hope of salvation affects his judgment. Nature and natural needs are all that is of concern to him. Robinson Crusoe is a
kind of Bible of the new science of nature and reveals man's true original condition.
EMILE
This novel, moreover, provides a new kind of play for the first activ-ity of the imagination. In the first place, the boy does not imagine beings or places which do not exist. He imagines himself' in situations and subject to necessities which are part of his experience. Actually his imagination divests itself of the imaginary beings that seem so real in ordinary society and are of human making. He sees himself outside of the differences of nation and religion which cover over nature and are the themes of ordinary poetry. Second, he does not meet
with heroes to whom he must subject himself or whom he is tempted to rival. Every man can be Crusoe and actually is Crusoe to the extent
that he tries to be simply man. Crusoe's example does not alienate Emile from himself as do the other fictions of poetry; it helps him to be himself. He understands his hero's motives perfectly and does not ape deeds the reasons for which he cannot imagine.
A boy, who imagining himself alone on an island uses all of his energy in thinking about what he needs to survive and how to procure it, will have a reason for all his learning; its relevance to what counts is assured; and the fear, reward, or vanity that motivate ordinary edu-cation are not needed. Nothing will be accepted on authority; the evidence of his senses and the call of his desires will be his authorities.
Emile, lost in the woods and hungry, finds his way home to lunch by his knowledge of astronomy. For him astronomy is not a discipline forced on him by his teachers, or made attractive by the opportunity to show off, or an expression of his superstition. In this way Rousseau shows how the sCiences, which have served historically to make men more dependent on one another, can serve men's independence. In this way the Emile who moves in civil society will put different values on things and activities than do other men. The division of labor which produces superfluity and makes men partial-pieces of a great machine -will seem like a prison, and an unnecessary prison, to him. He will treasure his wholeness. He will know real value, which is the inverse of the value given things by the vanity of social men. And he will respect the producers of real value and despise the producers of value founded on vanity. Nature will be always present to him, not as doc-trine but as a part of' his very senses. Thus Robinson Cmsoe, properly prepared for and used, teaches him the utility of the sciences and makes him inwardly free in spite of society's constraints.
Here then we have Rousseau's response to Plato. Plato said that all men always begin by being prisoners in the cave. The cave is civil society considered in its effect on the mind of those who belong to it. Their needs, fears, hopes, and indignations produce a network of opinions and myths which make communal life possible and give it meaning. Men never ex-perience nature directly but always mix their beliefs into what they see. Liberation from the cave requires the discovery of nature under the many layers of convention, the separating out of what is natural from what is man-made. Only a genius is capable of attaining a standpoint from which he can see the cave as a cave. That is why the philosopher, the rarest human type, can alone be autonomous and free of prejudice. Now, Rousseau agrees that once in the cave, genius is required to emerge from it. He also agrees that enlightenment is spurious and merely the
substitution of one prejudice for another. He himself was born in a cave and had to be a genius to attain his insight into the human con-dition. His life is a testimony to the heroic character of the quest for nature. But he denies that the cave is natural. The right kind of educa-tion, one independent of society, can put a child into direct contact with nature without the intermixture of opinion. Plato purified poetry so as to make its view of the world less hostile to reason, and he re-placed the ordinary lies by a noble lie. Rousseau banishes poetry alto-gether and suppresses all lies. At most he gives Emile Robinson Crusoe, who is not an "other" but only himself. Above all, no gods. At the age of fifteen, Emile has a standpoint outside of civil society, one fixed by his inclinations and his reason, from which he sees that his fellow men are prisoners in a cave and by which he is freed from any temptation to fear the punishments or seek the honors which are part of it. Rousseau, the genius, has made it possible for ordinary men to be free, and in this way he proves in principle the justice of democracy. Thus Rousseau's education of the young Emile confines itself to fostenng the development of the faculties immediately connected with his preservation. His desire for the pleasant and avoidance of the pain-ful are given by nature. His senses are the natural means to those ends. And the physical sciences, like mathematics, physics, and astronomy, are human contrivances which, if solidly grounded on the pure experi-ence of the senses, extend the range of the senses and protect them from the errors of imagination. The tutor's responsibility is, in the first place, to let the senses develop in relation to their proper objects; and, secondly, to encourage the learning of the sciences as the almost natural outcome of the use of the senses. Rousseau calls this tutelage, particularly with reference to the part that has to do with the senses, negative education. All animals go through a similar apprenticeship to life. But with man something intervenes that impedes or distorts na-ture's progress, and therefore a specifically negative education, a hu-man effort, is required. This new factor is the growth of the passions, particularly fear of death and amour-propre. Fed by imagination and intermingling with the desires and the senses, they transform judgment and lead to a special kind of merely human, or mythical, interpretation of the world. Negative education means specifically the tutor's artifices invented for the purpose of preventing the emergence of these two passions which attach men to one another and to opinions.
With respect to fear of death, Rousseau flatly denies that man does naturally fear death, and hence denies the premise of Hobbes's political philosophy (as well as what appears to be the common opinion of all political thinkers). Now Rousseau does not disagree with the modern natural right thinkers that man's only natural vocation is self-preserva-tion or that man seeks to avoid pain, but Rousseau insists that man is not at first aware of the meaning of death, nor does man change his beliefs or ways of life to avoid it. He argues that death, as Hobbes's man sees it, is really a product of the imagination; and only on the basis of that imagination will he give up his natural idle and pleasure-loving life in order to pursue power after power so as to forestall death's assaults. The conception that life can be extinguished turns life, which
EMILE
the parent gives the child the impression that all things are moved by intention and that command or prayer can put them at man's disposal. Moreover, anger itself animates. The child who is angry at what does not bend to his will attributes a will to it. This is the case with all anger, as a moment's reflection will show. Anger is allied with and has its origin in amour-propre. Once it is activated, it finds intention and responsibility everywhere. Finally it animates rivers, storms, the heav-ens, and all sorts of benevolent and malevolent beings. It moralizes the universe in the service of amour-propre.
In early childhood, there is a choice: the child can see everything or nothing as possessing a will like his own. Either whim or necessity governs the world for him. Neither case is true, but for the child the notion that necessity governs his world is the more salutary because nature is necessity and the primary things are necessary. The pas-sions must submit to necessity, whereas necessity cannot be changed by the passions. s Before he comes to terms with will, a man must have understood and accepted necessity. Otherwise he is likely to spend his life obeying and fearing gods or trying to become one. Unlike more recent proponents of freedom, Rousseau recognized that without ne-cessity the realm of freedom can have no meaning.
Rousseau's teaching about amour-propre goes to the heart of his disagreement with Plato. Plato had argued that something akin to what Rousseau calls amour-propre is an independent part of the soul. This is thymos, spiritedness, or simply anger. It is the motive of his war-riors in the Republic and is best embodied in Achilles, who is almost entirely thymos. Plato was aware of all the dangers of thymos, but he insisted that it must be given its due because it is part of human na-ture, because it can be the instrument for restraining desire, and be-cause it is connected with a noble and useful human type. Simply, it is
thymos that makes men overcome their natural fear of death. Rather than excise it, Plato sought to tame this lion in the soul. The education in Books II-III of the Republic suggests the means to make it gentle and submissive to reason. However, these warriors do require myths and noble lies. They are cave dwellers. Man naturally animates the universe and tries to make it responsive to his demands and blames it
for resisting. Plato focuses on Achilles, who struggles with a river that he takes to be a god, just as Rousseau is fascinated by the madness of Xerxes, who beats a recalcitrant sea.9 These are the extreme but
most revealing instances of the passion to rule. The difference between Plato and Rousseau on this crucial point comes down to whether anger is natural or derivative. Rousseau says that a child who is not corrupted and wants a cookie will never rebel against the phrase, "There are no more," but only against, "You cannot have one." Plato insists that this is not so. Men naturally see intention where there is none and must become wise in order to separate will from necessity in nature. They do, however, both agree that thymos is an important part of the spiritual economy, and that, once present, it must be treated with the greatest respect. Herein they differ from Hobbes, who simply doused this great
8. P. 219 below.
cause of war with buckets of fear, in the process extinguishing the soul's fire. Rousseau gives a complete account of pride and its uses and abuses, whereas other modern psychologists have either lost sight of it or tried to explain it away. Our education does not take it seriously, and we risk producing timid souls or ones whose untrained spiritedness is wildly erratic and seeks dangerous outlets.
Given that the child must never confront other wills, Jean-Jacques tells us that he cannot be given commandments. He would not understand even the most reasonable restriction on his will as anything other than the expression of the selfishness of the one giving the command-ments. The child must always do what he wants to do. This, we recog-nize, is the dictum of modern-day progressive education, and Rousseau is rightly seen as its source. What is forgotten is that Rousseau's full formula is that while the child must always do what he wants to do, he should want to do only what the tutor wants him to do.1° Since an uncorrupt will does not rebel against necessity, and the tutor can manipulate the appearance of necessity, he can determine the will without sowing the seeds of resentment. He presents natural necessity in palpable form to the child so that the child lives according to nature prior to understanding it.
Rousseau demonstrates this method in a story that shows how he improves on earlier moral teachings.l l He puts his Emile in a garden where there are no nos, no forbidden fruit, and no Fall, and tries to show that in the end his pupil will be healthy, whole, and of a purer morality than the old Adam. He gets Emile to respect the fruit of another without tempting him.
The boy is induced to plant some beans as a kind of game. His curiosity, imitativeness, and childish energy are used to put him to the task. He watches the beans grow while Jean-Jacques orates to him, supporting him in the pleasure he feels at seeing the result of his work and encouraging him in the sense that the beans are his by supplying a proper rationale for that sense. The speech does not bore him as a sermon would because it supports his inclination instead of opposing it. Jean-Jacques gives him what is in essence Locke's teaching on property. The beans belong to Emile because he has mixed his labor with them. Jean-Jacques begins by teaching him his right to his beans rather than by commanding him to respect the fruits of others.
Once the child has a clear notion of what belongs to him, he is given his first experience of injustice. One day he finds that his beans have been plowed under. And therewith he also has his first experience of anger, in the form of righteous indignation. He seeks the guilty party with the intention of punishing him. His selfish concern is identical with his concern for justice. But much to his surprise, Emile finds that the criminal considers himself to be the injured party and is equally angry with him. It is the gardener, and he had planted seeds for melons -melons that were to be eaten by Emile-and Emile had plowed under those seeds to plant his beans. Here we have will against will, anger against anger. Although Emile's wrath loses some of its
force-inas-10. P. 120 below. 11. Pp. 97-100 below.
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much as the gardener has an even better claim to have right on his side (he was the first occupant), and this according to the very notion of right which Emile uses and which he so eagerly imbibed from Jean-Jacques-the situation could lead to war. But Jean-Jacques avoids that outcome by means of two strategems. First, Emile's attention is di-verted from his beans by the thought of the rare melons he would have enjoyed. Second, a kind of social contract is arranged: in the future Emile will stay away from the gardener's lands if he is granted a small plot for his beans. In this way the boy is brought to understand and respect the property of others without losing anything of his own. If
there were a conflict of interest, Emile would naturally prefer his own. But Jean-Jacques does not put him in that position. If Emile were commanded to keep away from what he desires, the one who com-manded him to do so would be responsible for setting him against him-self and encouraging him to deceive. A luscious fruit in the garden which was forbidden would only set the selfish will of the owner against Emile's nature. Jean-Jacques at least gives Emile grounds for respecting property and brings him as close to an obligation as can be grounded on mere nature. Greater demands at this stage would be both ineffec-tive and corrupting. The tempter is the giver of commandments. Rousseau here follows Hobbes in deriving duties, or approximations to them, from rights. In this way Emile will rarely infringe the rights of others, and he will have no intention to harm them.
It is this latter that constitutes the morality of the natural man and also that of the wise man (according to Rousseau).12 It takes the place of the Christian's Golden Rule. When Rousseau says that man is by nature good, he means that man, concerned only with his own well-being, does not naturally have to compete with other men (scarcity is primarily a result of extended desire), nor does he care for their opin-ions (and, hence, he does not need to try to force them to respect him). Man's goodness is identical to his natural freedom (of body and soul) and equality. And here he agrees, contrary to the conventional wisdom, with Machiavelli, who said men are all bad. For Machiavelli meant that men are bad when judged from the standpoint of the common good, or of how men ought to live, or of the imaginary cities of the old writers. These make demands on men contrary to their natural inclina-tions and are therefore both unfounded and ineffective. If these stan-dards are removed and men's inclinations are accepted rather than blamed, it turns out that with the cooperation of these inclinations sound regimes can be attained. From the standpoint of imaginary per-fection man's passions are bad; from that of the natural desire for self-preservation they are good. Machiavelli preaches the adoption of the latter standpoint and the abandonment of all transcendence and with it the traditional dualism. And it is this project of reconciliation with what is that Rousseau completes in justifying the wholeness of self-concern, in proving that the principles of the old morality are not only ineffective but the cause of corruption (since they cause men to deny themselves and thus to become hypocrites), and in learning how
to control that imagination which gives birth to the imaginary cities (which, in their opposition to the real cities, are the signs of man's dividedness) .
The moral education of the young Emile is, then, limited to the effec-tive establishment of the rule that he should harm no one. And this moral rule cooperates with the intellectual rule that he should know how to be ignorant. This latter means that only clear and distinct evidence should ever command belief. Neither passions nor dependen-cies should make him need to believe. All his knowledge should be relevant to his real needs, which are small and easily satisfied. In a sense, Rousseau makes his young Emile an embodiment of the En-lightenment's new scientific method. His will to affirm never exceeds his capacity to prove. For others that method is only a tool, liable to the abuses of the passions and counterpoised by many powerful needs. All this is described in the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. But to Emile, whose only desire is to know and live according to the necessary, the new science of the laws of nature is a perfect complement. With a solid floor constituted by healthy senses in which he trusts and a ceiling provided by astronomy, Emile is now prepared to admit his fel-lows into a structure which their tempestuous passions cannot shake. This fifteen-year-old, who has not unlearned how to die, harms no one, and knows how to be ignorant, possesses a large share of the Socratic wisdom.
II
Emile at fifteen cares no more for his father than his dog. A child who did would be motivated by fear or desire for gain induced by de-pendency. Rousseau has made Emile free of those passions by keeping him self-sufficient, and he has thus undermined the economic founda-tions of civil society laid by Hobbes and Locke. Since Rousseau agrees with the latter that man has no natural inclination to civil society and the fulfillment of obligation, he must find some other selfish natural passion that can somehow be used as the basis for a genuine-as op-posed to a spurious, competitive-concern for others. Such a passion is necessary in order to provide the link between the individual and dis-interested respect for law or the rights of others, which is what is meant by real morality.
Rousseau finds such a solution in the sexual passion. It necessarily involves other individuals and results in relations very different from those following from fear or love of gain. Moreover, Rousseau dis-covers that sexual desire, if its development is properly managed, has singular effects on the soul. Books IV-V are a treatise on sex edu-cation, notwithstanding the fact that they give a coherent account of God, love, and politicS. "Civilization" can become "culture" when it is motivated and organized by sublimated sex.
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explanation of that uniquely human turning away from mere bodily gratification to the pursuit of noble deeds, arts, and thoughts-was introduced to the world by Rousseau. The history of the notion can be traced from him through Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche (who first introduced the actual term) and to Freud (who popularized it). Rousseau's attempt to comprehend the richness of man's soul within the context of modern scientific reductionism led him to an interpreta-tion which is still our way of looking at things although we have lost clarity about its intention and meaning. Rousseau knew that there are sublime things; he had inner experience of them. He also knew that there is no place for the sublime in the modern scientific explanation of man. Therefore, the sublime had to be made out of the nonsublime; this is sublimation. It is a raising of the lower to the higher. Character-istically, those who speak about sublimation since Freud are merely lowering the higher, reducing the sublime things to their elements and losing a hold on the separate dignity of the sublime. We no longer know what is higher about the higher.
These last two books of Emile then undertake in a detailed way the highly problematic task of showing how the higher might be derived from the lower without being reduced to it, while at the same time giving us some sense of what Rousseau means by the sublime or noble. It
has not in the past been sufficiently emphasized that everything in Books IV-V is related to sex. Yet without making that connection the parts cannot be interpreted nor the whole understood.
Rousseau takes it for granted that sex is naturally only a thing of the body. There is no teleology contained in the sexual act other than generation-no concern for the partner, no affection for the children on the part of the male, no directedness to the family. As a simply natural phenomenon, it is not more significant or interesting than eating. In fact, since natural man is primarily concerned with his survival, sex is of secondary importance inasmuch as it contributes nothing to the sur-vival of the individual. But because it is related to another human being, sex easily mingles with and contributes to nascent amollT-propre. Being liked and preferred to others becomes important in the sexual act. The conquest, mastery, and possession of another will thus also become central to it, and what was originally bodily becomes almost entirely imaginary. This semifolly leads to the extremes of alienation and exploitation. But precisely because the sexual life of civilized man exists primarily in the imagination, it can be manipulated in a way that the desire for food or sleep cannot be. Sexual desire, mixed with imag-ination and amour-propre, if it remains unsatisfied produces a tre-mendous psychic energy that can be used for the greatest deeds and thoughts. Imaginary objects can set new goals, and the desire to be well thought of can turn into love of virtue. But everything depends on purifying and elevating this desire and making it inseparable from its new objects. Thus Rousseau, although Burke could accuse him of pedantic lewdness, would be appalled by contemporary sex education, which separates out the bodily from the spiritual in sex, does not understand the problem involved in treating the bloated passions of social man as though they were natural, is oblivious to the difficulty of
attaching the indeterminate drive to useful and noble objects, and fails to appreciate the salutary effect of prolonged ignorance while the bodily humors ferment. Delayed satisfaction is, according to him, the condition of idealism and love, and early satisfaction causes the whole structure to collapse and flatten.
Rousseau's meaning is admirably expressed by Kant, who, following Rousseau, indicated that there is a distinction between what might be called natural puberty and civil puberty.13 Natural puberty is reached when a male is capable of reproduction. Civil puberty is attained only when a man is able to love a woman faithfully, rear and provide for children, and participate knowledgeably and loyally in the political order which protects the family. But the advent of civilization has not changed the course of nature; natural puberty occurs around fifteen; civil puberty, if it ever comes to pass, can hardly occur before the mid-dle twenties. This means that there is a profound tension between natural desire and civil duty. In fact, this is one of the best examples of the dividedness caused in man by his history. Natural desire almost always lurks untamed amidst the responsibilities of marriage. What Rousseau attempts to do is to make the two puberties coincide, to turn the desire for sexual intercourse into a desire for marriage and a willing submission to the law without suppressing or blaming that original desire. Such a union of desire and duty Kant called true culture. Rousseau effects this union by establishing successively two passions in Emile which are sublimations of sexual desire and which are, hence, not quite natural but, one might say, according to nature: compassion and love.
COMPASSION
In this first stage the young man is kept ignorant of the meaning of what he is experiencing. He is full of restless energy and becomes sen-sitive. He needs other human beings, but he knows not why. In becom-ing sensitive to the feelbecom-ings of others and in needbecom-ing them, his imagina-tion is aroused and he becomes aware that they are like him. He feels for the first time that he is a member of a species. (Until now he was simply indifferent to other human beings, although he knew he was a human being.) At this moment the birth of amouT-propTe is inevi-table. He compares his situation with those of other men. If the com-parison is unfavorable to him, he will be dissatisfied with himself and envious of them; he will wish to take their place. If the comparison is unfavorable to them, he will be content with himself and not competitive with others. Thus amour-propre is alienating only if a man sees others whom he can consider happier than himself. It follows that, if one wishes to keep a man from developing the mean passions which excite the desire to harm, he must always see men whom he thinks to be un-happier than he is. If, in addition, he thinks such misfortunes could hap-pen to him, he will feel pity for the sufferer.
This is the ground of Rousseau's entirely new teaching about com-passion.14 Judiciously chosen comparisons presented at the right stage
13. "Conjectural Beginning of Human History," p. 61, note. 14. Pp. 221 if. below.
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of life will cause Emile to be satisfied with himself and be concerned with others, making him a gentle and beneficent man on the basis of his natural selfishness. Thus compassion would be good for him and good for others. Rousseau introduces a hardheaded softness to moral and political thought.
He asserts that the good fortune of others puts a chill on our hearts, no matter what we say. It separates us from them; we would like to be in their place. But their suffering warms us and gives us a common sense of humanity. The psychic mechanism of compassion is as fol-lows. (I) Once a man's imaginative sensibility is awakened, he winces at the wounds others receive. In an attenuated form he experiences them too, prior to any reflection; he sympathizes; somehow these wounds are inflicted on him. (2) He has a moment of reflection; he realizes that it is the other fellow, not he, who is really suffering. This is a source of satisfaction. (3) He can show his own strength and superiority by assisting the man in distress. (4) He is pleased that he has the spiritual freedom to experience compassion; he senses his own goodness. Active human compassion (as opposed to the animal compas-sion described in the Discourse on the Origins
of
Inequality) requires imagination and arnOllT-propre in addition to the instinct for self-preservation. Moreover, it cannot withstand the demands of one's own self-preservation. It is a tender plant, but one which will bear sweet fruit if properly cultivated.Emile's first observations of men are directed to the poor, the sick, the oppressed, and the unfortunate. This is flattering to him, and his first sentiments toward others are gentle. He becomes a kind of social worker. And, as this analysis should make clear, the motive and in-tention of Rousseauan compassion give it little in common with Chris-tian compassion. Rousseau was perfectly aware that compassion such as he taught is not a virtue and that it can lead to abuse and hypocrisy. But he used this selfish passion to replace or temper other, more dan-gerous passions. This is part of his correction of Hobbes. Rousseau finds a selfish passion which contains fellow feeling and makes it the ground of SOciality to replace those passions which set men at odds. He can even claim he goes farther down the path first broken by Hobbes, who argued that the passions, and not reason, are the only effective motives of human action. Hobbes's duties towards others are rational deductions from the passion for self-preservation. Rousseau anchors concern for others in a passion. He makes that concern a pleasure rather than a disagreeable, and hence questionably effective, conclusion.
Rousseau's teaching on compassion fostered a revolution in demo-cratic politics, one with which we live today. Compassion is on the lips of every statesman, and all boast that their primary qualification for office is their compassion. Rousseau singlehandedly invented the cate-gory of the disadvantaged. Prior to Rousseau, men believed that their claim on civil society has to be based on an accounting of what they contribute to it. After Rousseau, a claim based not on a positive qual-ity but on a lack became legitimate for the first time. This he introduced as a counterpoise to a society based on Locke's teaching, which has no category for the miserable other than that of the idle and the
quarrel-some. The recognition of our sameness and our common vulnerability dampens the harsh competitiveness and egotism of egalitarian political orders. Rousseau takes advantage of the tendency to compassion result-ing from equality, and uses it, rather than self-interest, as the glue binding men together. Our equality, then, is based less on our fear of death than on our sufferings; suffering produces a shared sentiment with others, which fear of death does not. For Hobbes, frightened men make an artificial man to protect them; for Rousseau, suffering men seek other men who feel for them.
Of course Emile will not always be able to confine his vision to poor men without station. There are rich and titled men who seem to be much better off than he is. If he were brought to their castles and had a chance to see their privileges and their entertainments, he would likely be dazzled, and the worm of envy would begin to gnaw away at his heart. Jean-Jacques finds a solution to this difficulty by making Emile read history and bringing back what had been banished in Book 11.1;' This is the beginning of Emile's education in the arts, as opposed to the sciences. The former can only be studied when his sentiments are sufficiently developed for him to understand the inner movements of the heart and when he experiences a real need to know. Otherwise, learning is idle, undigested, excess baggage at best. Emile's curiosity to find out about all of Plutarch's heroes and set his own life over against their lives fuels his study. Rousseau expects that this study will reveal the vanity of the heroes' aspirations and cause revulsion at their tragic failures. Emile's solid, natural pleasures, his cheaply purchased Stoi-cism and self-sufficiency, his lack of the passion to rule, will cause him to despise their love of glory and pity their tragic ends. The second level of the education in compassion produces contempt for the great of this world, not a slave's contempt founded in envy, indignation, and resent-ment, but the contempt stemming from a conviction of superiority which admits of honest fellow feeling and is the precondition of compassion. This disposition provides a standpoint from which to judge the social and political distinctions among men, just as Robinson Crusoe's island pro-vided one for judging the distinctions based on the division of labor. The joining of these two standards enables Emile to judge the life of tyrants. Socrates enabled Glaucon and Adeimantus to judge it by comparing it to the life of philosophers; Emile can use his own life as the basis for judgment, for his own soul contains no germ of the tyrannical tempta-tion. The old way of using heroes in education was to make the pupil dissatisfied with himself and rivalrous with the model. Rousseau uses them to make his pupil satisfied with himself and compassionate toward the heroes. The old way alienated the child and made him prey to authorities whose titles he could not judge. Self-satisfaction of egali-tarian man is what Rousseau promotes. But he is careful to insure that this satisfaction is only with a good or natural self.
Reading is again the means of accomplishing the third and final part of the education in compassion.16 This time the texts are fables
IS. Pp. 236-244; cf. 110-112 below.
16. Pp. 244-249; cf. 112-116 below; and Tocqueville, Democracy in America,
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which contain a moral teaching. They, too, had been banished in Book II, because a child would always identify himself with, e.g., the fox who cheats the crow rather than with the crow who loses the cheese, for a child understands nothing about vanity and a great deal about cheese. At this later stage Rousseau has arranged for Emile to have been de-ceived by confidence men who play upon his vanity, so that when he reads the fable he will immediately identify with the crow and attain self-consciousness. Satire becomes the mirror in which he sees himself. All this is intended to remind him that he, too, is human and could easily fall victim to the errors made by others. It is as though Rousseau had used Aristotle's discourse on the passions as a text and followed Aristotle's warning that those who do not imagine that the misfortunes befalling others can befall them are insolent rather than compassion-ate.17 The first stage of Emile's introduction to the human condition
shows him that most men are sufferers; the second, that the great, too, are sufferers and hence equal to the small; and the third, that he is potentially a sufferer, saved only by his education. Equality, which was a rational deduction in Hobbes, thus becomes self-evident to the senti-ments. Emile's first principle of action was pleasure and pain; his sec-ond, after the birth of reason and his learning the sciences, was utility; now compassion is added to the other two, and concern for others be-comes part of his sense of his own interest. Rousseau studies the pas-sions and finds a way of balancing them one against the other rather than trying to develop the virtues which govern them. He does for the soul what Montesquieu did for the government; invent the separation and balance of powers.
But for all its important consequences in its own right, compassion within the context of Emile's education is only a step on the way to his fulfillment as husband and father. Its primary function is to make Emile social while remaining whole.
LOVE
Finally Rousseau must tell Emile the meaning of his longings. He re-veals sex to the young Emile as the Savoyard Vicar revealed God to the young Jean-Jacques.IS Although it is impossible to discuss the Pro-fession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar here, it is essential to the under-standing of Rousseau's intention to underline the profound differences between the two revelations. The Vicar's teaching is presented to the corrupt young Rousseau and never to Emile. Moreover, the Vicar teaches the dualism of body and soul, which is alien and contradictory to the unity which Emile incarnates. In keeping with this, the Vicar is otherworldly and guilt-ridden about his sexual desires, which he deprecates, whereas Emile is very much of this world and exalts his sexual desires, which are blessed by God and lead to blessing God. Emile's rewards are on earth, the Vicar's in Heaven. The Vicar is the best of the traditional, and he is only an oasis in the desert which Rousseau crossed before reaching his new Sinai.
17. Aristotle Rhetoric II 8 and 2. 18. Pp. 260-313, 316-334 below.
Thus at the dawn of a new day, Emile learns that the peak of sexual longing is the love of God mediated by the love of a woman.19 Sub-limation finally operates a transition from the physical to the meta-physical. But before speaking to Emile, Rousseau explains to his read-ers how difficult it is to be a good rhetorician in modern times. Speech has lost its power because it cannot refer to a world with deep human significance. In Greek and Biblical antiquity the world was full of meaning put there by the great and terrible deeds of gods and heroes. Men were awe-struck by the ceremonies performed to solemnize public and private occasions. The whole earth spoke out to make oaths sacred. But now the world has been deprived of its meaning by Enlightenment. The land is no longer peopled by spirits, and nothing supports human aspiration anymore. Thus men can only affect one another by the use of force or the profit motive. The language of human relations has lost its foundations. This is, as we would say, a demythologized world. And these remarks show what Rousseau is about. He wants to use imagina-tion to read meaning back into nature. The old meanings were also the results of imaginings the reality of which men believed. They were monu-ments of fear and anger given cosmic significance. But they did produce a human world, however cruel and unreasonable. Rousseau suggests a new poetic imagination motivated by love rather than the harsher pas-sions, and here one sees with clarity Rousseau's link with romanticism.
With this preface, he proceeds to inform Emile what the greatest pleasure in life is. He explains to him that what he desires is sexual intercourse with a woman, but he makes him believe that his object contains ideas of virtue and beauty without which she would not be at-tractive, nay, without which she would be repulsive. His bodily satis-faction depends upon his beloved's spiritual qualities; therefore Emile longs for the beautiful. Jean-Jacques by his descriptive power incor-porates an ideal into Emile's bodily lust. This is how sex becomes love, and the two must be made to appear inseparable. This is the reason for the delay in sexual awareness. Emile must learn much before he can comprehend such notions, and his sexual energy must be raised to a high pitch. Early indulgence would separate the intensity of lust from the objects of admiration. Rousseau admits that love depends upon illu-sions, but the deeds which those illusions produce are real. This is the source of nobility of mind and deed, and apart from fanaticism, nothing else can produce such dedication.
Rousseau develops all this with preCision and in the greatest detail. Only Plato has meditated on love with comparable profundity.20 And it is Plato who inspired Rousseau's attempt to create love. The modern philosophers with whom Rousseau began have notably unerotic teach-ings. Their calculating, fear-motivated men are individuals, not directed towards others, towards couplings and the self-forgetting implied in them. Such men have fiat souls. They see nature as it is; and, since they are unerotic, they are unpoetic. Rousseau, a philosopher-poet like Plato, tried to recapture the poetry in the world. He knew that Plato's
Symposium taught that eros is the longing for eternity, ultimately the 19. P. 426 below.
